bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
- Location
- Wichita, Kansas
There wasn't direct contact I think, but I'm pretty sure there were long trade routes that just went through plenty of intermediaries as the coastal and Central American peoples in between, like Cassava/Manioc/Yuca was actively spreading up into the Oaxaca lowlands as of Cortes' expedition. They may have actually heard a couple wild rumors, more from Spanish activity before Pizarro's bid to seize Peru, but what the Inka didn't have was a body of actionable intelligence on the particulars of how Spanish Entradas worked, and having a latin alphabet wouldn't have at all helped there- cause they were in the middle of huuge plagues and a big civil war that only then got wrapped up like within the same year of Pizarro's landing. And on top of all that- ten years to spread from one Spanish conquistador and governor to another like-minded player in the forming Spanish colonial government is a lot less of an ask than getting either a written or oral account out of Mesoamerica, through the web of trade, and then actually translating it into Quechua from Nahuatl or Spanish or whatever.
And the really pernicious larger idea here was that the Inka were some child-like hermit kingdom unable to conceive of not just their empire falling and the world turning upside-down but like normal Machiavellian political calculus and military strategy? Which is nonsense because again, they just had a civil war, and were doing all sorts of normal empire things expanding Tawantinsuyu to reach as far south as the Mapuche resisting them, as far east into the mountainous interior as the Chachapoya still barely conquered, and as far north as the Quitu and Canari in Ecuador also still resisting or very recently and uncertainly conquered. Like within the same lifetimes of all the big players of the fall of the Inka as an empire recently.
It's like, does the great Viking raid on Lindisfarne indicate that the Saxons were all insular unprepared hermit kingdoms? Even if in another universe by demonic misfortune the King of Northumbra happened to also be right there in the middle of the raid, praying for his soul in murdering his cousin-king of East Anglia, and events dramatically spiraled into the early immediate imposition of the Danelaw?
And the really pernicious larger idea here was that the Inka were some child-like hermit kingdom unable to conceive of not just their empire falling and the world turning upside-down but like normal Machiavellian political calculus and military strategy? Which is nonsense because again, they just had a civil war, and were doing all sorts of normal empire things expanding Tawantinsuyu to reach as far south as the Mapuche resisting them, as far east into the mountainous interior as the Chachapoya still barely conquered, and as far north as the Quitu and Canari in Ecuador also still resisting or very recently and uncertainly conquered. Like within the same lifetimes of all the big players of the fall of the Inka as an empire recently.
It's like, does the great Viking raid on Lindisfarne indicate that the Saxons were all insular unprepared hermit kingdoms? Even if in another universe by demonic misfortune the King of Northumbra happened to also be right there in the middle of the raid, praying for his soul in murdering his cousin-king of East Anglia, and events dramatically spiraled into the early immediate imposition of the Danelaw?
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